August « 2020 « Suramya's Blog

August 31, 2020

Hard Wired by Len Vlahos

Filed under: Reviews-Science Fiction,Reviews-Young Adult Fantasy — Suramya @ 8:51 PM

Hard Wired
by Len Vlahos

Description:

From acclaimed Morris finalist Len Vlahos comes a grounded sci-fi story about a boy who’s more than human, perfect for fans of Westworld and LIFEL1K3.

Quinn thinks he’s a normal fifteen year-old. He plays video games, spends time with his friends, and crushes on a girl named Shea. But a shocking secret brings his entire world crashing down: he’s not a boy. He’s artificial intelligence.

After Quinn “wakes up,” he sees his world was nothing more than a virtual construct. He’s the QUantum INtelligence Project, the first fully-aware A.I. in the world–part of a grand multi-billion-dollar experiment led by the very man he believed to be his dead father.

But as Quinn encounters the real world for the first time, his life becomes a nightmare. While the scientists continue to experiment on him, Quinn must come to grips with the truth: his mom and brother don’t exist. His friends are all adults who were paid to hang out with him. Even other super computers aren’t like him. Quinn finds himself completely alone–until he bonds with Shea, the real girl behind the virtual one. As Quinn explores what it means to truly live, he questions who he can trust. What will it take to win his freedom . . . and where does he belong?

Award-winning author Len Vlahos offers a perfect blend of science fiction and contemporary in this unputdownable, high stakes tale that explores big questions about what it means to be human.

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Rating:

Review:

I found this book via Cory Doctorow’s book recommendation on his Twitter feed and the summary immediately caught my eye. An AI who doesn’t know its an AI (or rather Quantum Intelligence – QI) and finds out that he is a QI after living 15 years as a regular boy. The story was well paced and the first few chapters setup the background and stage for us to connect with Quinn before he is told the truth. Once the truth is told things change and Len has really captured how scientists would behave in such a situation. For example there is a scene where Quinn is told that he is a QI and starts crying because of the emotional impact, when the scientists notice this they immediately start celebrating because its a breakthrough in the development of a QI not caring that Quinn is emotionally wroth. This is exactly how any of the scientists/programmers I have worked with would react. Things like this make the book a lot more realistic. The book also has a lot of pop culture references which are fun to catch.

There are a few minor plot holes but nothing that requires you to suspend your belief completely. In fact the scenario explored in the book is something that will come to life in the next few years thanks to the advances in the field of computing & AI/ML.

The ending was a bit confusing at first and it took me a few mins to understand what happened. It would be interesting to see a sequel for the book because while the story is complete there are enough potential threads to be the launch point for a sequel.

Final Recommendation: Good read. Will require a bit of Computer knowledge to understand the depth of the novel fully

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World Map listing Literal Translations of Every Country’s Name

Filed under: Interesting Sites — Suramya @ 10:57 AM

‘What’s in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.’ a famous quote by William Shakespeare from Romeo & Juliet. When we talk about Country names it turns out that the names incorporate lots of insights into the history and culture of a place. To understand this in more detail Credit Card Compare which is an Australia-based website recently dug into the etymology of place names to create a world map that highlights the literal translation of the world’s countries names.

“We live in a time of air travel and global exploration,” the company writes in the blog. “We’re free to roam the planet and discover new countries and cultures. But how much do you know about the people who lived and explored these destinations in times past? Learning the etymology—the origin of words—of countries around the world offers us fascinating insight into the origins of some of our favorite travel destinations and the people who first lived there.”

Name translations for Asia

Some of the names are obvious and I already knew about them, others were a surprise. For example I didn’t know that Bhutan’s literally translates as “The Land of the Thunder Dragon” or that Brazil literally means “Red like an Amber”. The obvious ones are India which means “Land of the Indus” and Russia which means “Land of the Rus”

Check out the full selection at: World map: the literal translation of country names and details on origin of these names here.

– Suramya

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August 30, 2020

How to write using inclusive language with the help of Microsoft Word

Filed under: Computer Software,Knowledgebase,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:59 PM

One of the key aspects of Inclusion is Inclusive language, and its very easy to use non-inclusive/gender specific language in our everyday writings. For example, when you meet a mixed gender group of people almost everyone will say something to the effect of ‘Hey Guys’. I was guilty of the same and it took a concentrated effort on my part to change my greeting to ‘Hey Folks’ and other similar changes. Its the same case with written communication and most people default to male gender focused writing. Recently I found out that Microsoft Office‘s correction tools, which most might associate with bad grammar or improper verb usage, secretly have options that help catch non-inclusive language, including gender and sexuality bias. So I wanted to share it with everyone.

Below are instructions on how to find & enable the settings:

Open MS Word
Click on File -> Options
Select ‘Proofing’ from the menu in the left corner and then scroll down on the right side to ‘Writing Style’ and click on the ‘Settings’ button.

Scroll down to the “Inclusiveness” section, select all of the checkboxes that you want Word to check for in your documents, and click the “OK” button. In some versions of Word you will need to scroll down to the ‘Inclusive Language’ section (its all the way near the bottom) and check the ‘Gender-Specific Language’ box instead.

Click Ok

It doesn’t sound like a big deal when you refer to someone by the wrong gender but trust me its a big deal. If you don’t believe me try addressing a group of men as ‘Hello Ladies’ and then wait for the reactions. If you can’t address a group of guys as ladies then you shouldn’t refer to a group of ladies as guys either. I think it is common courtesy and requires minimal effort over the long term (Initially things will feel a bit awkward but then you get used to it).

Well this is all for now. Will write more later.

– Suramya

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August 29, 2020

You can be identified online based on your browsing history

Filed under: Computer Related,Computer Software,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 7:29 PM

Reliably Identifying people online is a bedrock of the million dollar advertising industry and as more and more users become privacy conscious browsers have been adding features to increase the user’s privacy and reduce the probability of them getting identified online. Users can be identified by Cookies, Super Cookies etc etc. Now there is a research paper (Replication: Why We Still Can’t Browse in Peace: On the Uniqueness and Reidentifiability of Web Browsing Histories) that claims to be able to identify users based on their browsing histories. It is built on top of previous research Why Johnny Can’t Browse in Peace: On the Uniqueness of Web Browsing History Patterns and re-validates the findings of the previous paper and builds on top of it.

We examine the threat to individuals’ privacy based on the feasibility of reidentifying users through distinctive profiles of their browsing history visible to websites and third parties. This work replicates and

extends the 2012 paper Why Johnny Can’t Browse in Peace: On the Uniqueness of Web Browsing History Patterns[48]. The original work demonstrated that browsing profiles are highly distinctive and stable.We reproduce those results and extend the original work to detail the privacy risk posed by the aggregation of browsing histories. Our dataset consists of two weeks of browsing data from ~52,000 Firefox users. Our work replicates the original paper’s core findings by identifying 48,919 distinct browsing profiles, of which 99% are unique. High uniqueness hold seven when histories are truncated to just 100 top sites. Wethen find that for users who visited 50 or more distinct do-mains in the two-week data collection period, ~50% can be reidentified using the top 10k sites. Reidentifiability rose to over 80% for users that browsed 150 or more distinct domains.Finally, we observe numerous third parties pervasive enough to gather web histories sufficient to leverage browsing history as an identifier.

Original paper

Olejnik, Castelluccia, and Janc [48] gathered data in a project aimed at educating users about privacy practices. For the analysis presented in [48] they used the CSS :vis-ited browser vulnerability [8] to determine whether various home pages were in a user’s browsing history. That is, they probed users’ browsers for 6,000 predefined “primary links” such as www.google.com and got a yes/no for whether that home page was in the user’s browsing history. A user may have visited that home page and then cleared their browsing history, in which case they would not register a hit. Additionally a user may have visited a subpage e.g. www.google.com/maps but not www.google.com in which case the probe for www.google.com would also not register a hit. The project website was open for an extended period of time and recorded profiles between January 2009 and May 2011 for 441,627 unique users, some of whom returned for multiple history tests, allowing the researchers to study the evolution of browser profiles as well. With this data, they examined the uniqueness of browsing histories.

This brings to mind a project that I saw a few years ago that would give you a list of websites from the top 1k websites that you had visited in the past using javascript and some script-fu. Unfortunately I can’t find the link to the site right now as I don’t remember the name and a generic search is returning random sites. If I find it I will post it here as it was quite interesting.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

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August 28, 2020

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

Filed under: Reviews-Science Fiction — Suramya @ 10:51 PM

The Space Between Worlds

by Micaiah Johnson

Description:

The Sunday Times bestseller

A stunning science fiction debut, The Space Between Worlds is both a cross-dimensional adventure and a powerful examination of identity, privilege, and belonging.

‘My mother used to say I was born reaching, which is true. She also used to say it would get me killed, which it hasn’t. Not yet, anyway.’

Born in the dirt of the wasteland, Cara has fought her entire life just to survive. Now she has done the impossible, and landed herself a comfortable life on the lower levels of the wealthy and walled-off Wiley City. So long as she can keep her head down and avoid trouble, she’s on a sure path to citizenship and security – on this world, at least.

Of the 380 realities that have been unlocked, Cara is dead in all but 8.

Cara’s parallel selves are exceptionally good at dying – from disease, turf wars, or vendettas they couldn’t outrun – which makes Cara wary, and valuable. Because while multiverse travel is possible, no one can visit a world in which their counterpart is still alive. And no one has fewer counterparts than Cara.

But then one of her eight doppelgängers dies under mysterious circumstances, and Cara is plunged into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and future in ways she never could have imagined – and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her earth, but the entire multiverse.

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Rating: (3.5/5)

Review:

This is the debut novel by Micaiah and the premise of the book is what caught my eye. The existance of Parallel worlds is a standard trope in the SciFi genre but mostly they have people traveling them without issues in this book though the only way you can travel safely between the parallel worlds is if your doppelganger on the target world is dead. Which makes it nearly impossible for the pampered and rich to travel to other worlds successfully, they have to use people who have lived hard lives as their surrogates to travel. This includes our protagonist, who is unique in the fact that her other selves are really skilled at dying.

For the first few chapters I really didn’t like the character but most of the issues that were annoying me were explained a few chapters in. That’s when the novel became very engrossing and made it easy to understand Cara’s motivation for the most part. I did find the supporting characters to be a bit dull & two dimensional. The world-building outside of the City & Ash is non-existent and we never really find out what happened to the world that caused it to become such a dystopia (apart for some vague references and hints). Plus there is a minor sub-plot between Cara & Dell which wasn’t really required and felt really forced. The ending also felt a bit forced but not so much that it completely spoilt the book for me.

Final Review: A decent read, looking forward for future novels once the author builds up her writing skills further.

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Got my first bot response to a Tweet and some analysis on the potential Bot

Filed under: Humor,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:21 PM

Today I achieved a major milestone of being on the internet, 🙂 I finally had a bot/troll (potential) respond to one of my Tweets with the usual nonsense. Normally I would ignore but it was just so funny to see this response that I had to comment on it. The reply was to my Tweet about how we could potentially achieve our target of eradicating Tuberculosis by 2025 because of the masks we are wearing due to Covid-19. You see TB bacteria are spread through the air from one person to another and just like Covid TB bacteria are put into the air when a person with TB disease of the lungs or throat coughs, speaks, or sings infecting people nearby when they breathe in these bacteria. Now that wearing a mask is becoming the new normal in most parts of the world (except for some morons who don’t understand/believe science or believe that politics is stronger than science) there is a high chance that it will also reduce the spread of other illnesses spread through air.

My Tweet & the response to it

Once I saw the response, I clicked on the profile and scrolled through the posting history and saw that a majority of the posts (atleast for the amount I was able to stomach while scrolling down) were retweets of Anti-Masker, Covid denial, Pro-Trump, anti vaccine nonsense. As I needed a distraction I decided to spend a bit of time to try and identify if the account was just a stupid person or a clever bot and did a little bit of investigation on the account.

Looking at the account a couple of things stood out right from the start, the first was that the account was created in July 2020 and the username had a bunch of numbers in it which is usually the case for automatically created accounts. So I ran a query on the account via Botometer® by OSoMe which gave me a whole bunch of data on the account and there was a bunch of data that made it stand out as being a potential bot. In just over a month (5 weeks and a day to be exact) the account had tweeted 6,197 times and 2,000 times in just the past 7 days which equates to about 12 tweets every hour every day. The other data point that stood out was that the account tweeted at almost the same time every day which is usually indicative of a Bot.

Interestingly the Botometer does give the account a low possibility of being a fully automated bot but that could be just because the person running it is manually feeding the responses and having the system spray it out. Or it could be a bored person doing it for LOL’s, which is code for morons who don’t know better and think they are being ‘cool’ or ‘edgy’ or whatever. But if that’s the case then they really need to get a better hobby.

Well this is all for now. Wear a mask when you go out and stay safe.

– Suramya

PS: I have no paitience for the anti-masker/anti-vaccine/anti-science nonsense so will be deleting any comments/responses or making fun of the comments depending on my mood at the time.

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August 27, 2020

The Empire of Gold (Daevabad 03) by S A Chakraborty

Filed under: Reviews-Fantasy — Suramya @ 4:55 PM

The Empire of Gold (Daevabad 03)

by S A Chakraborty

Description:

The final chapter in the bestselling, critically acclaimed Daevabad Trilogy, in which a con-woman and an idealistic djinn prince join forces to save a magical kingdom from a devastating civil war.

Daevabad has fallen.

After a brutal conquest stripped the city of its magic, Nahid leader Banu Manizheh and her resurrected commander, Dara, must try to repair their fraying alliance and stabilize a fractious, warring people.

But the death of his people and loss of his beloved Nahri have unleashed the worst demons of Dara’s dark past. To vanquish them, he must face some ugly truths about his history and put himself at the mercy of those he once considered enemies.

Having narrowly escaped their murderous families and Daevabad’s deadly politics, Nahri and Ali, now safe in Cairo, face difficult choices of their own. Though Nahri is finding peace in the rhythms of her old home, she is haunted by the knowledge that the loved ones she left behind and the people who considered her a savior, are at the mercy of a new tyrant.

Ali, too, cannot help but look back, and is determined to return to rescue his city and the family that remains.

As peace grows more elusive and old players return, Nahri, Ali, and Dara come to understand that in order to remake the world, they may need to fight those they once loved…and take a stand for those they once hurt.

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Rating: (4/5)

Review:

The is the final book in the Daevabad Trilogy and picks up just a few hours after the 2nd book ended. Nahid leader Banu Manizheh has succeeded in her conquest of Daevabad. Nahri and Ali are in Cario but don’t know how they got there and how to get back, and to make things even more dire magic has stopped working for everyone except Dara who is struggling with the guilt of the deaths caused by their conquest while trying to hold the tatters of the city together and prevent a decent into anarchy.

The characters are well written and their motivations make sense, there is no clear cut ‘bad guy’ in the book as both sides have committed acts that they are ashamed of and are trying to get past to rebuild their city. The descriptions of Cairo and the daily lives of people living there are realistic and even the supporting characters have a purpose and are not cardboard cut-outs there to further the plot. I especially liked the fact that book is based out of the Middle East and not in the western world since a majority of Fantasy/Scifi books are based in the US or in EU. It gives me a chance to learn more about a culture not normally depicted in popular books.

However there is a small part of the script that I didn’t quite understand/like mainly because there was no buildup to it, even though it solved a major problem for Nahri & Ali it felt contrived just because it came out of the blue especially since the folks helping had been identified as people who don’t interfere in mortal affairs. I can’t give more details without revealing a major plot twist.

Another minor detail that was a bit annoying was the author’s tendency of switching from a character’s first name to last name and back multiple times in a chapter for no particular reason. It made the book a bit confusing in the begining as I thought they were two different characters not realizing they were both the same person.

However, all said and done the book was beautifully written and I highly recommend you check it out.

– Suramya

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Optimizing the making of peanut butter and banana sandwich using computer vision and machine learning

Filed under: Computer Related,Computer Software,Tech Related — Suramya @ 12:42 AM

The current Pandemic is forcing people to stay at home depriving them of activities that kept them occupied in the past so people are getting a bit stir-crazy & bored of staying at home. Its worse for developers/engineers as you never know what will come out from the depths of a bored programmer’s mind. Case in point is the effort spent by Ethan Rosenthal in writing Machine Learning/Computer Vision code to Optimizing the coverage of the banana slices on his peanut butter & Banana sandwich so that there is the same amount of banana in every mouthful. The whole exercise took him a few months to complete and he is quite proud of the results.

It’s really quite simple. You take a picture of your banana and bread, pass the image through a deep learning model to locate said items, do some nonlinear curve fitting to the banana, transform to polar coordinates and “slice” the banana along the fitted curve, turn those slices into elliptical polygons, and feed the polygons and bread “box” into a 2D nesting algorithm
[…]
If you were a machine learning model (or my wife), then you would tell me to just cut long rectangular strips along the long axis of the banana, but I’m not a sociopath. If life were simple, then the banana slices would be perfect circles of equal diameter, and we could coast along looking up optimal configurations on packomania. But alas, life is not simple. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic, and banana slices are elliptical with varying size.

The problem of fitting arbitrary polygons (sliced circular banana pieces) in a box (the bread piece) is NP-hard so the ideal solution is practically uncomputable and Rosenthal’s solution is a good approximation of the optimal solution in a reasonable time frame. The final solution is available as a command-line package called “nannernest” which takes a photo of the bread piece & banana as its argument and returns the an optimal slice-and-arrange pattern for the given combination.

Sample output created by nannernest

Check out the code & the full writeup on the project if you are interested. Even though the application is silly it’s a good writeup on using Machine Learning & Computer Vision for a project.

Source: Boing Boing

– Suramya

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August 26, 2020

Peace Talks (Dresden Files Book 16) by Jim Butcher

Filed under: Reviews-Urban Fantasy — Suramya @ 1:42 PM

Peace Talks (Dresden Files Book 16)
by Jim Butcher

Description:

HARRY DRESDEN IS BACK AND READY FOR ACTION, in the new entry in the #1 New York Times bestselling Dresden Files.

When the Supernatural nations of the world meet up to negotiate an end to ongoing hostilities, Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only professional wizard, joins the White Council’s security team to make sure the talks stay civil. But can he succeed, when dark political manipulations threaten the very existence of Chicago—and all he holds dear?

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Rating:

Review:

Jim Butcher is an author who is on my immediately purchase list which basically means that I immediately purchase any books released by him. This is the 16th book in his Harry Dresden series and was released 6 years after the last installment which is too long to wait for any sequel. (To make up the next book in the series is getting released in Oct 2020). Since it had been a while since I last read the series I was a bit wary about starting the new book without re-reading the whole series but I am happy to say that you don’t need to remember all the previous books as this one is self contained. (for the most part. A few points would be confusing if you haven’t read the previous books)

When a series goes on for as long as this one has its easy to get to a point where you can’t keep raising the stakes anymore without repeating yourself. Thankfully Jim is an expert in ensuring that while the stakes are raised it doesn’t get to a point where its ridiculous (Looking at you Supernatural).

Harry has fought Fae queens, monsters, and a homicidal Island entity in the past and in this iteration has a lot on his shoulders with his White Council wizard duties, his obligatory Winter Knight duties, and being a father to his daughter. In addition to all the above duties he is requested to serve as emissary for Winter at upcoming peace negotiations and help secure them from threats. Things almost immediately go for a toss and Harry is soon neck deep in trouble from all sides.

The main thing I like about the series is that all the injuries/physiological scars from the previous books don’t magically disappear once the book ends, Harry still feels the pain/damage from his injuries and has to work around them. He is actively trying to avoid depending too much on his Winter Knight persona to manage the pain & even karen’s recovery & physio therapy is realistic and nicely written.

The action throughout the book is well paced and exciting and the supporting characters are reasonably fleshed out with cameo’s from favorites from previous books. The book ends with a major cliff-hanger so its good that the next chapter is getting released so quickly.

Final Review: Loved the book, waiting for the next chapter eagerly.

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